{"id":347846,"date":"2025-12-16T00:45:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T00:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/347846\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T00:45:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T00:45:10","slug":"hamnet-director-relied-on-paul-mescal-to-grasp-shakespeares-prose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/347846\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamnet director relied on Paul Mescal to grasp Shakespeare\u2019s prose"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Oscar-winning director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao has admitted that she understood \u201conly a third\u201d of Shakespeare\u2019s language when she began work on Hamnet, her forthcoming film adaptation of Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s bestselling novel.<\/p>\n

Zhao, who won the award for best director for Nomadland in 2021, said that despite Shakespeare being central to the project, she struggled with the playwright\u2019s language and relied heavily on Paul Mescal to guide her understanding of the text.<\/p>\n

The Chinese-born director told the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast: \u201cI didn\u2019t speak English [at school], so when you don\u2019t speak English and you have Romeo and Juliet in front of you in the equivalent of the ninth grade\u2026 still when I was on set of Hamnet, when Paul was delivering his speech I only understand a third of it, technically, because I don\u2019t understand what those words mean.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Chlo\u00e9<\/p>\n

Chlo\u00e9 Zhao<\/p>\n

BEN KRIEMANN\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Zhao, who was born and raised in Beijing and studied in the US and UK, said: \u201cI can study it and translate it and understand what it all means, but Paul said to me, \u2018Listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don\u2019t have to understand what they\u2019re saying. You feel it in the body, the language is written like that.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cSo in a way, me and Lukasz [Zal, the film\u2019s cinematographer] \u2014 who also doesn\u2019t speak much English \u2014 we sat there and we watched Paul\u2019s performance and in a way we kind of embodied Agnes, who doesn\u2019t quite understand everything, but we feel it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hamnet<\/a> tells the story of the death of Shakespeare\u2019s 11-year-old son and imagines the emotional impact of that loss on his parents. The film is based on O\u2019Farrell\u2019s 2020 novel, which centres on Shakespeare\u2019s wife Agnes rather than on the playwright himself. Mescal plays Shakespeare, while Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes. O\u2019Farrell discovered that Shakespeare\u2019s wife, commonly known as Anne, had been referred to as Agnes in her father\u2019s will and so used this name.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Paul Mescal: Much ado about an Irishman as the Bard in Hamnet<\/a><\/p>\n

Zhao, who co-wrote the screenplay with O\u2019Farrell, said that the film deliberately avoids treating Shakespeare as a distant literary figure, instead presenting him as a husband and father shaped by grief. The director explained that she did not come to the project \u201cfeeling that he\u2019s any different than a man who fell in love with a woman and couldn\u2019t quite express his feelings\u201d.<\/p>\n

She suggested that her own distance from Shakespeare\u2019s language may have helped her approach the story in a more instinctive way.<\/p>\n

She said: \u201cI think the reason why the producers and also Maggie [O\u2019Farrell] chose me is because I don\u2019t feel that way about William Shakespeare \u2014 I don\u2019t have the same reverence. I do have reverence intellectually, but I don\u2019t have the burden on my shoulders as many people in the West do.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added that the pressure of performing Shakespeare is on the actors, explaining: \u201cIt\u2019s on Paul, who does have a lot of reverence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jessie<\/p>\n

Part of the film was shot at the Globe theatre in London<\/p>\n

AGATA GRZYBOWSKA\/AP<\/p>\n

Zhao said that she made Mescal\u2019s depiction of the playwright \u201cless expressive\u201d and talkative than the one portrayed in O\u2019Farrell\u2019s novel. <\/p>\n

The director added that her and Zal\u2019s reactions to Mescal\u2019s performance helped inform their decisions on which take had been successful. She said: \u201cSo in those days [filming] in the Globe, I\u2019m judging by me and Lukasz\u2019s physical reaction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe start crying or we go \u2018ugh\u2019 or our throat is tight, our stomach turns. Then we know it\u2019s the right take. We didn\u2019t even have to understand every word, which is really magical. It\u2019s made me think about Shakespeare completely different [sic].\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than aiming to reproduce Elizabethan language or theatrical convention, she focused on the emotional experience of loss, which is universal and recognisable.<\/p>\n

Zhao said that the film does not attempt to present a definitive account of Shakespeare\u2019s life. Instead, it uses the limited historical record as a starting point for a story about family, creativity and mourning. She said that she was more interested in how grief might shape a person than in literary history. <\/p>\n

Zhao suggested that audiences often feel excluded by Shakespeare because they believe that full comprehension is required. This comes as the film and theatre world aims to make Shakespeare more accessible, particularly to younger audiences. Zhao said that if viewers feel the emotional truth of a scene, an exact comprehension of every word is not essential.<\/p>\n

Hamnet premiered at the BFI London Film Festival<\/a> in October this year and will be released in cinemas in January. Zhao said that she hoped the film would allow audiences to engage with Shakespeare\u2019s world without feeling intimidated and recognise that his work continues to speak to modern experiences of love and loss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Oscar-winning director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao has admitted that she understood \u201conly a third\u201d of Shakespeare\u2019s language when she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-347846","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}